Is Death Real?

What is Death?

Death is the end, or so we are told. You live in a matrix of matter known as your body and you have control over this body. This control began at a moment that we call birth: despite that you were in control of it inside of the womb. You grew up and came to know your body as under your control as you learned to will this mass of particles to collectively work together and preform any action you desire. Then you were told to love this body, because there will come a day when you no longer have control over it. There comes a day when your will shall leave this matrix of flesh and render it inactive and without will. This moment of termination is known as death: the moment you stop being in control of the actions your body takes.

We know that death happens because people who are alive have seen this event: when a body loses it's controller. The body still remains, but it is inactive and it has no desire to do anything, it looks empty. The old among us may have seen this strange event happen to their loved ones or simply some local people from their community. Once they notice what happens they return to us and tell us of the experience. They tell us that there comes a point at the end of every life when people stop commanding their bodies, like a driver who leaves a car while its in motion. This event has become known as Death.

Certainty and Doubt

Yet nobody has ever gone through death themselves. Our only recollection of it is from those who have watched others die. We never hear the story of people who have died, because by nature, once you die you give up control of the body and with it the tools that you would use to communicate with the rest of us. Our only knowledge of the experience comes from outside observation: We can never study death from within.

Or can we?

There is a phenomenon known as the Near Death Experience. This is a surreal phenomenon where people tend to have an archetype experience.

Usually a person would literally go through the throes of death, be it a heart attack or drowning leading to a black out of normal consciousness. Then a few moments later they would forget that they had died and find themselves in the same location that they were the moment before. Confused they would scan the location and see their body lying dead on the floor. This would lead to them realizing that they are outside their body, and that they actually are in a body of light or even no body at all. This is often followed by an experience of transcendence in which they have a life review or even come in contact with deities that the are culturally familiar with such as Jesus or Krisha. They may even meet negative deities or locations such as Satan or Hell.

Experience: the Cradle of Life

To a crowd of people your body may seem to have turned off and it's controller has ceased to exist, yet from within it seems that experience actually continues. At the moment of death your relationship with your body may end, but your ability to experience continues.

This speculation removes the body as the centerpiece of life. Imagine that your body may actually be a vessel in which you occupy as a driver and death is only an event in which this driver leaves the body. If you had lived your whole life inside of a car, the first time in 65 years you step out of it would be extremely surreal, and to all your car bound friends they may look at your empty car and weep at the tragic loss.

In this perspective, that which is alive is not the matter which you control, but the person within you who has the experience of being alive. Consider that for a moment. You are having experience right now, but if you deconstruct your body to try find out what it is, you are reduced down to nothing.

It is not your eyes, but somewhere behind them.

It is not your brain, but something inside of it.

It is not your voice, but that within you that chooses your words.

It is not your pleasure or your pain, but that being within who experiences these sensations.

Time is the Flowing River

I can never say for sure if these ideas are true, but they are merely a perspective, and through entertaining the possibilities of many diverse perspectives one can come very close to the truth.

To follow on from the previous idea that experience, not matter, is actually that which is alive, we then must ask: what is a body since it is made of matter?

A body seems to be a collection of matter in which our experience has control over. When experience decides to do something it directs the body. Like how wind may direct a ship in an ocean. The body then carries out this command through the medium of existence. To the ship the medium of existence would be the water. To a body the medium of existence would be Time.

If the wind will's the ship to go west for a long period of time eventually it will reach a large continent. The ship will have moved through the medium of water to a new place over the course of time. If the wind blows the ship a random set of directions for that same period: the ship might not reach any land.

Similarly If my experiencing faculty decides that I am going to workout six days a week for two years, I will end up in good shape. If I decide to eat McDonalds as often for as long: the results may be a lot different.

Time then seems to be the flow of a river, and the river itself is our experience. The river can never crawl back up the mountain it came from, but the river can control the path in which it takes down the landscape to the ocean.

Death is like gravity: the one force the river cannot fight, yet why should the river be afraid? Without gravity it would have no flow and so no life. What's more, when it reaches the end it flows into the great ocean, to become part of the water cycle again.

Biocentrism

This approach is unscientific as there is no real way of proving these ideas, but then again the goal is not to be scientific: the goal is to be narrative.

Yet many have tried to reconcile these ideas with the current scientific paradigm, and some have proven strangely successful. These people operate on the idea that science uses a narrative in which to explain the world.

This narrative is a practical one: it treats only the objects that we share as real. We all share the experience of our bodies and so our bodies are real. This narrative is brilliant for sharing results and so establishing certain truths: truths which are great for building, engineering and technology.

But the alternate narrative notes that this worldview consciously chooses to wear blinkers. Contemporary science chooses to think inside the box. The goal is then to share with others what they found in their boxes.

A new narrative is emerging that has actually existed since the dawn of history asking us not to think outside the box, but to remember that what is real is the being looking in the box. That the walls of the box were set up by ourselves, and we can remove them at any time.

Death is real when you see that at the end of a period of time the box falls apart.

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